There have been threads about levelling times and instead of highjacking that thread I thought it might make sense to start a new one. Especially since the devs are asking about questions of "time dedication" at the moment as well.
A bird's eye view of this topic might first look at how many progression systems there are and how many fun game loops there are.
Progression systems:
- Character Level
- Weapon skills
- Item power
- Character Religion
- Professions
- Enchantments
- World buffs/secondary power progressions
- Node reputation
- Node advancement (If you are a citizen)
When we talk about time to max level we are only talking about time to max 1 progression system. We are not talking about time to max character power, which would include all of the progression systems. So far the bar to max level has been set around
250 hours.
Now let's think about this in terms of how players are participating in the game loops at various stages of player power.
Game Loops:
- Commissions, Side Quests, Story Arcs
- Killing monsters/bosses
- Gathering resources / using professions
- Running caravans
- Node/Castle Sieges
- Open World PVP
OK, so the commissions and side quests come across as mostly during the levelling stage; the first 250 hours. The rest can be done to varying effectiveness at all stages of the game.
So now our question becomes:
"
How much time should be required to achieve relative character power milestones?".
To answer that, we should also consider how players have multiple conflicting interests. We want to have both meaningful progressions in character power (part of the MMORPG game feel) AND we want to feel like our characters are somewhat balanced for pvp, while at the same time having a monster power scale that is mostly based on character level.
I'm thinking something like this:
50 hrs to 50% max character power,
250 hrs to 75% - freshly dinged 50,
1000 hrs to 100%.
The idea being that it still takes a very long time to cap on character power, but it doesn't really take that long to get strong enough to be effective in the world. This allows the different Progression Systems to add their own little bits of value as you engage with them. It also means that people who are arbitrarily grinding to lvl 50 might not actually be getting the best time value in character power progression, which is part of the design intent in Ashes of Creation.
However, this might be too steep to work with the pve/monster power scaling. It also means that number of players will be everything, because a couple guys that have been playing for a month can gank a maxed whale that's been grinding since launch.
Thoughts?
